Karen M. Staller

Epistemological boot camp: The politics of science and what every qualitative researcher needs to know to survive in the academy

Doctoral students and faculty members sometimes face unexpected barriers when engaging in qualitative research that can impede career advancement. In part, this can be because qualitative methodologies often conflict with objectivist epistemological assumptions that are deeply embedded in university cultures. Since ontology, epistemology, methodology, and methods are related, it is imperative for qualitative researchers to understand these differences and recognize the resulting tensions. Furthermore, when conducting qualitative research it is critical to design studies in which the epistemology, methodology, and methods are logically integrated for the best quality work. In this article, I seek to make transparent the link between everyday problems that arise (in dissertation defenses, funding and Institutional Review Board applications, peer review, tenure and promotion, etc.) and the underlying epistemological and methodological issues that produce them. I seek to educate beginning qualitative researchers about the importance of this integration in their own work and to arm them with some diagnostic skills. In doing so they will be better prepared to successfully negotiate the politics of science, the politics of evidence, and the politics of methods within their home institutions.

Railroads, Runaways, & Researchers Returning Evidence Rhetoric to Its Practice Base

Using observations of railroad employees and two 17-year-old girls who wanted to board a train without proper identification or parental permission, one of the major themes of the First International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry, which raised challenges to the growing practice of defining “good science” as the result of “evidence-based, biomedical models of inquiry,” is considered. Limitations of evidence-based practice (EBP) in dealing with complicated, situated, and practice-based assessment problems are discussed. The qualitative research community ought not to concede the framing of EBP. It should be reframed to focus on practice-based evidence(s) (PBE). Doing so changes the nature of debate, highlights the practitioner role, recognizes practitioner agency in evaluating evidence, focuses on real-world situations (thus embracing complications), and honors the notion of multiple and competing evidence sources. PBE encourages research designs favored by qualitative researchers that explore contextually situated practices and promote valuebased social justice agendas.

Buckshot's Case: Social Work and Death Penalty Mitigation in Alabama

This co-constructed narrative reports on the experiences of a clinical social worker who testifies as an expert witness at death penalty mitigation hearings in Alabama. A state with a historic record riddled with racial inequities and injustices, Alabama uses the death penalty aggressively. For many poor defendants, the difference between death and life in prison without the possibility of parole is made at mitigation hearings in which the jury may hear testimony which puts the defendant’s life and crime in context. There is no better-suited profession than social work for conducting this task. This is the story of one social worker and one defendant whose life is on the line.

Qualitative analysis: The art of building bridging relationships:

In a recently published special issue of Qualitative Inquiry, the opening editorial entitled, ‘‘Qualitative data after coding’’ sets out the issue’s premise, dealing with the gap between theory and methodology (St. Pierre and Jackson, 2014). The title’s reference to ‘‘after coding’’ does not mean after—as in following the activity of coding—but rather after, as in an era post-coding in which coding is no longer touted as the building block of qualitative analysis. Reminding us of Patti Lather’s characterization of qualitative analysis as a ‘black hole’, the issue’s co-editors, Elizabeth St. Pierre and Alecia Jackson, argue that this black hole is so difficult to ‘‘describe and explain to the non-positivist’’ that ‘‘we have resorted to equating qualitative data analysis with coding.’’ (p. 715). St. Pierre and Jackson trace the coding problem to decades of defending interpretative qualitative inquiry against critiques stemming from ‘‘scientifically based research’’ which confounded already ‘‘confused epistemological and ontological commitments.’’ The end result, they conclude, is ‘‘a social science approach that claims to be interpretive supports a positivist, quasi-statistical analytic practice—coding data’’ (St. Pierre and Jackson, 2014 p. 715). It is a custom that is Qualitative Social Work 2015, Vol. 14(2) 145–153 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1473325015571210 qsw.sagepub.com

Attitudes Toward Health-Seeking Behaviors of College Students in Ukraine

This study elicited multiple perspectives on attitudes towards help-seeking behaviors associated with mental health problems of college students in Ukraine. It employed a sequential mixed method design. First, focus groups were conducted with students and psychologists. These data were analyzed and used to develop a survey. The survey was subsequently administered to psychiatrists, the primary providers of services to people with psychiatric problems in Ukraine. Findings from the focus groups revealed four help-seeking behaviors: 1) friends and partners, (2) alcohol use, (3) family support, and (4) conventional and alternative mental health services. Students and psychiatrists differed in their beliefs about help-seeking behaviors. Although psychiatrists believed students sought help from mental health and/or addictions professionals, students reported using self-medication and social network support. Implications include a troubling gap in perceptions between the students impacted and the professional communities that should be serving them.

Missing Pieces, Repetitive Practices Child Sexual Exploitation and Institutional Settings

The sexual abuse and exploitation of children is a serious problem. Adult sexual predators often use strategies known as grooming to entice their victims. These include targeting particularly vulnerable youth, gift giving, and systematically engaging in desensitizing sexual behaviors. Less commonly discussed is the notion of institutional grooming, the practice of strategically placing themselves in positions of public trust where they have access to children yet appear beyond reproach. Once situated, they can abuse children for decades without deterrence in spite of the fact that individuals around them may be aware–or partially aware–of their behavior. This article examines three cases, one involving a priest, another a football coach, and the third a pediatrician and considers the institutional practices and cultures that permit (or potentially permit) abuse and exploitation to flourish. Among other things it finds: confidentiality mandates and other codes of silence and secrecy impede information sharing; departmental or programmatic silos exist each with their own independent and competing agendas; confused reporting lines within the institution often end in the hands of powerful individuals who have an interest in non-disclosure; barriers exist to investing within the institution and reporting outside the institution often including mistrust and disempowerment of law enforcement and child protective services; extreme power differences exist between and among victims, predators, reporters, and other institutional players; and finally, intense loyalties personal, professional, and institutional are present. These factors produce institutional cultures that protect pedophiles and conspire against their vulnerable, individual, child victims.

Working the Scam: Policing Urban Street Youth in a New World Context

This study examines the environment and worldview of Sgt. T, a veteran officer in charge of a specialized police unit. Sgt. T, along with his staff of officers and social workers, monitors a major transportation hub in a large urban setting for runaway and homeless youth as well as other minors unaccompanied by adults. The author uses skullduggery, first introduced by Sgt. T to mean “nothing is as it appears,” as an interpretative lens and explores both its dangers and its usefulness. This includes the role skullduggery plays in field access and how it is used in managing interpersonal transactions, maintaining authority, and as an organizing worldview. New priorities and new skullduggeries suggest the inevitable extinction of this youth unit, yet broader lessons are at stake. Empirical material, collected in the field, was primarily conversational and narrative.

Moving beyond description in qualitative analysis: Finding applied advice

There is nothing wrong with description in qualitative analysis. In fact, thick description is the bedrock upon which much of the best qualitative research is built. Or, as Jane Gilgun (2015) argues, description is often the foundation upon which interpretation and theory development is based in qualitative inquiry. That said, all too often from where I sit in my editor’s chair, I see articles that rest on thin description, at best. The authors’ repeat what their participants have said in summary fashion and then stop, leaving a reader to wonder what the significance of the work. Or, to use the question so often posed to U.S. students of research methods, so what? Last year, a group of four early-to-senior scholars were invited by a group of doctoral students to participate in a panel discussion at the Society for Social Work Research (SSWR) conference held in the United States in January 2015. I was honored to be a member of this panel which was dubbed Beyond Description: A Workshop on Moving from Description to Analysis in Qualitative Social Work Research. The student organizers included two from the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, Aditi Das and Amanda Michelle Jones, as well as Charity Hoffman from the University of Michigan. The students asked their seniors to think about how we moved from describing qualitative data to interpreting it during analysis. They asked, ‘‘how did we do that heavy lifting’’? The SSWR session was lively and provocative and appeared to be well received by those in attendance. For this reason, it seemed worth trying to expand on these conference comments. The net results are published in this issue of Qualitative Social Work. The opening article is by Jane Gilgun. Jane elaborates in her piece entitled, ‘‘Beyond description to interpretation and theory in qualitative social work research’’ (Gilgun, 2015). Her article is followed by a talented early-career scholar, Tina K. Sacks who writes an essay entitled, New pathways to analysis through thick description: Historical trauma and emerging qualitative research (Sacks, 2015). Qualitative Social Work 2015, Vol. 14(6) 731–740 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1473325015612859 qsw.sagepub.com

Difficult conversations: Talking with rather than talking at

Several weeks ago, a close friend died suddenly, unexpectedly, and at far too young an age. My family has attempted to make meaning of this loss. We have tried to wrap words around feelings and offer comfort or hope when there is really nothing comforting or hopeful that can be said. This unexpected death has led us on a path to other, discomforting, conversations on important topics like estate planning, burial preferences, and proxies of the health and financial affairs varieties. In general, in my family, these topics are happily avoided, rather than enthusiastically embraced. The conversations are difficult primarily because they have forced us to confront the fragility of life and life’s limits so immediately and directly.

The Structure of Federal Policy: Deciphering the United States Code.

Abstract CSWE mandates the study of social welfare policy, its history, and its evaluation; thus, assignments that require students to select policy for study are common. Educators provide frameworks for analysis but may not address the prerequisite step of locating policy for study, so students flounder in government documents without the tools to navigate the organizational and retrieval structures. This article provides basic tools for locating federal law and for deciphering the United States Code (USC), which topically organizes and houses all federal legislation. It uses the familiar examples of social security, welfare reform, and charitable choice. Familiarizing social workers with the USC provides useful knowledge for various policy projects and a conceptual framework for understanding federal policy, past, and present.